AFTERWORD
Love, meditation, and
mindfulness
Developing feelings of lovingkindness, compassion, joy
in others’ happiness, and equanimity is its own reward. The ability to
cultivate these states is an assurance of reduction of our own
suffering. And to the extent we are able to reduce our own suffering, we
can help other beings reduce theirs.
But it is this very suffering which is the key. The
Buddha’s teachings on love were not something he developed because they
sounded nice, or reflected family values, or any other admirable
soundings ideas. These four "divine dwellings" are an approach to the
main teachings of the Buddha: that birth, illness, old age and death are
unsatisfactory; that grief, lamentation, suffering, affliction and
despair are unsatisfactory; that not getting what one wants is
unsatisfactory; that those element responsible for feelings of
attachment and clinging are unsatisfactory.
By unsatisfactory the Buddha didn’t mean they were
"wrong". He just meant they led to unhappiness, that the way to ending
unhappiness was understanding it roots and undertaking practices to
combat it directly.
The principle practice to develop one’s mind along the
path to the end of suffering is "mediation". In Buddhism, mediation does
not mean "hard thinking", it means calming the body and thought
processes and then observing all that goes on inside oneself. The
meditative technique which is the most general and widely practiced is
breathing mediation, which consists of focussing on one’s attention on
the breath and then observing the consequent bodily and mental
processes. Metta, lovingkindness, can also be used as a preliminary
technique. Its primary contribution to mental development is in the
establishment of calm, which arises when one banishes all enmity and
ill-will from one’s mind. When one is totally free from anger and
similar feelings, one can move on to observing the mental process
dispassionately. Thus in addition to the social benefits which may
accrue from the practice of metta, the dedicated practitioner will also
find him or herself—and consequently al living beings—well along the way
to the ending of suffering.
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